Installing Visual Studio 2010 – Error writing the project file. Class not registered

This weekend I installed the new Visual Studio 2010 on several different machines. I use multiple OS platforms  so it’s useful to have Visual Studio installed on machines with different configurations. I had no problems installing on Windows 7 and Windows Vista, but hit a snag on Windows Server 2003 (SP2).
After installing Visual Studio 2010, VS launched fine but when I attempted to create a project, I got the not-so-helpful error message “Error writing the project file. Class not registered”. OK.

I noticed that when I launched VS for the first time I did not get the option to select a settings configuration, such as General Development Settings or Web Development, like I did with the installs on other machines. In the VS 2010 UI, when I went to Tools | Import and Export Settings, the UI dialog had an empty list box where I expected to see a list of files with a .vssettings extension. After searching the Internet for this error message I came across several possible causes. Well to cut to the chase, it turns out that the machine I had installed onto did not have the required MSXML6 parser. A VS settings file is XML-based and evidently needs MSXML6 rather than earlier versions of the parser.

A quick install of that component from Microsoft.com/downloads solved the problem.